Politics Blog

More and more people are getting their news from cable TV and the Internet. As if you didn’t know that already. Yawn.

— PoliPundit

More and more people are getting their news from cable TV and the Internet. As if you didn’t know that already. Yawn.

— PoliPundit

The president’s suicidal immigration “reform” proposal makes two key assumptions:

1. “Guest workers” are needed to do “jobs that Americans won’t do.”

2. The illegal immigrants already here cannot be practically deported and America’s borders cannot be secured against illegal immigration.

Both these assumptions are false.

The we-need-guest-workers assumption is patently untrue. Before 10 million illegal immigrants came here in the nineties, our economy ran just fine without them. And opening up America’s market for low-skilled jobs to foreigners would hurt the most vulnerable Americans - the poor and the unskilled. There are five billion people living in countries poorer than Mexico and they will be lining up to be “guest workers.” (In fact, Hispanic “guest workers” will be swamped by a tide of Chinese and Indian “guest workers.” I doubt if that will win the president many Hispanic votes.) Such “guest worker” programs have been tried in Europe for decades and they’ve led to incredible racial and ethnic strife, creating a racial underclass of menial laborers who live in crime-ridden, culturally-alienated urban neighborhoods.

Similarly, the president’s assumption that we can do nothing about illegal immigrants already here is flawed. There’s a simple, easy, cheap, humane way to deport the lot of them and secure our borders against most illegal immigration.

However, let’s set all this aside for a moment and buy the president’s assumptions. Let’s assume that “guest workers” are needed and that illegal immigrants cannot be deported. What about the mechanics of the president’s plan? Reader Keith Curtis, who blogs at Reagan Country, sent in a defense of the plan emphasizing its strongest features. His arguments and my rebuttals are below.

“Bush has stepped up border enforcment. This prevents the problem from getting worse. 1000 new border agents, 40% increase funding. Perhaps in the new bill, this value will increase yet again.“

To secure a border of the length we share with Mexico, we’ll need 100,000 agents. We don’t even have a tenth of that number and the border will remain porous unless we make it very uncomfortable for illegal immigrants to remain in the US. 1,000 more border agents is a sop that means very little.

“It will have a one-time process to document everyone and give them a 3 year work permit. This allows us to understand the situation.“

When it comes to illegal immigration, there are no “one-time processes.” Every “one-time” amnesty will lead to yet more illegals coming here from around the world in hopes of yet another “one-time” amnesty. The 1986 amnesty proved my point by creating a staggering increase in illegal immigration.

“Employers must now do a better job with hiring people. The risks of hiring undocumented people will go up, and the ability for illegals to get jobs will go down.“

Employers already face penalties for hiring illegals. What’s missing here is a mechanism for validating documents. As I’ve noted below, illegal immigrants give employers fake SSNs. The employers look the other way, claiming plausibly that there was no way for them to know the SSN was fake, thus avoiding the employer penalties that were put in place in 1986. All that’s needed to hold employers accountable is a validation system that employers can use, like the one I proposed in my simple two-step solution.

“If someone loses a job, then they must leave. Now that everyone currently here is documented, it becomes easier to make this happen.“

If they won’t leave now, when they’re undocumented, why would they leave then, when they’re undocumented? They’d get a fake SSN and continue working.

“Their social security money will be available to them when they return to their own nation. Finally a financial incentive for them to return.“

Yeah, but only when they retire, by which time President Chelsea Clinton will have given them amnesty.

“Illegals are currently stuck in America. Currently if they leave, they cannot come back. By granting them the ability to leave and return if they have a job, there is a chance they will head back.“

No way. Not when they know there’s yet another amnesty coming.

All of Keith’s arguments are calculated to convince conservatives that the Bush immigration “reform” proposal will reduce illegal immigration. I have a far simpler solution that will accomplish the same thing; but it requires you to renounce the president’s first assumption - that we need low-skilled, poorly-educated immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do.”

This really is a debate about just how much immigration America can take. I favor keeping immigration at reasonable levels (and I say that as a non-white recent legal immigrant.) At reasonable levels of immigration, immigrants are forced to assimilate into the American mainstream and adopt the American culture (yes, there is such a thing.) At very high levels of immigration - like the de facto illegal immigration we’re experiencing, or the legal immigration the president proposes - immigrants will not need to assimilate. They will cluster in immigrant enclaves, which will create a racial underclass of low-skilled, poor menial laborers who’re culturally alienated from the rest of the country. That is a volatile recipe for the sort of racial and ethnic strife you usually see in countries other than the United States.

– PoliPundit

I think we’ve flogged the immigration issue to death. My position should be abundantly clear by now: If the president’s suicidal immigration “reform” policies are rammed through Congress by Republican leaders too stupid to appreciate their supporters, then I will be forced to reconsider my support for the president’s re-election bid.

If even one percent of Republicans feel the same way I do, then the president will be looking at a 30,000-vote deficit in Florida. Republican leaders should think about that when deciding what course of action they will pursue.

For now, I will continue to support the president on the assumption that this is merely political posturing and that the whole thing will be quietly killed in Congress.

I’ve been devoting a lot of space to this issue and I’m sure my regular political-junkie readers need their insidery-politics fix. Our regularly scheduled programming will resume now.

— PoliPundit

Remember that entertaining ad the Club for Growth started running against Dean in Iowa a few days ago? You can watch the video at the Club’s web site.

— PoliPundit

The Note’s got a Saturday edition. Will they have a Sunday edition too?

UPDATE: Yep!

— PoliPundit

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has a good piece on how Democrats are going all out for Iowa Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV.)

As I noted weeks ago, Dean isdispatching an army of thousands of Deanie weenies, while Gephardt is relying on his union backers to trudge through the snow.

Some novice campaigners are not used to the Iowa winter:

Kat Woodruff, for example, had seen snow before - from inside an office in Washington, D.C. - but the 24-year-old woman from Long Beach, Calif., had never traipsed through the stuff until she arrived in Iowa to volunteer for Howard Dean.

Her impressions of Iowa?

“Ummmm . . . it’s very, very cold,” she said.

“There have been lots of things that I never took into account, like driving in it and getting ice stuck on my car. I’ve fallen on the ice a couple of times.”

Woodruff and two other California natives tried to get to The Des Moines Register’s candidate debate in Johnston.

“We didn’t make it,” she said. “We ended up in a ditch.”

— PoliPundit

I don’t know which is more disgusting - Weasel Clark’s position on abortion or his typical weaselly retraction.

First, here’s Weasel Clark’s “pro-choice” position stated in all its glory:

[Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of The Manchester Union Leader]: Let

The president’s suicidal immigration “reform” proposal makes two key assumptions:

1. “Guest workers” are needed to do “jobs that Americans won’t do.”

2. The illegal immigrants already here cannot be practically deported and America’s borders cannot be secured against illegal immigration.

Both these assumptions are false.

The we-need-guest-workers assumption is patently untrue. Before 10 million illegal immigrants came here in the nineties, our economy ran just fine without them. And opening up America’s market for low-skilled jobs to foreigners would hurt the most vulnerable Americans - the poor and the unskilled. There are five billion people living in countries poorer than Mexico and they will be lining up to be “guest workers.” (In fact, Hispanic “guest workers” will be swamped by a tide of Chinese and Indian “guest workers.” I doubt if that will win the president many Hispanic votes.) Such “guest worker” programs have been tried in Europe for decades and they’ve led to incredible racial and ethnic strife, creating a racial underclass of menial laborers who live in crime-ridden, culturally-alienated urban neighborhoods.

Similarly, the president’s assumption that we can do nothing about illegal immigrants already here is flawed. There’s a simple, easy, cheap, humane way to deport the lot of them and secure our borders against most illegal immigration.

However, let’s set all this aside for a moment and buy the president’s assumptions. Let’s assume that “guest workers” are needed and that illegal immigrants cannot be deported. What about the mechanics of the president’s plan? Reader Keith Curtis, who blogs at Reagan Country, sent in a defense of the plan emphasizing its strongest features. His arguments and my rebuttals are below.

“Bush has stepped up border enforcment. This prevents the problem from getting worse. 1000 new border agents, 40% increase funding. Perhaps in the new bill, this value will increase yet again.“

To secure a border of the length we share with Mexico, we’ll need 100,000 agents. We don’t even have a tenth of that number and the border will remain porous unless we make it very uncomfortable for illegal immigrants to remain in the US. 1,000 more border agents is a sop that means very little.

“It will have a one-time process to document everyone and give them a 3 year work permit. This allows us to understand the situation.“

When it comes to illegal immigration, there are no “one-time processes.” Every “one-time” amnesty will lead to yet more illegals coming here from around the world in hopes of yet another “one-time” amnesty. The 1986 amnesty proved my point by creating a staggering increase in illegal immigration.

“Employers must now do a better job with hiring people. The risks of hiring undocumented people will go up, and the ability for illegals to get jobs will go down.“

Employers already face penalties for hiring illegals. What’s missing here is a mechanism for validating documents. As I’ve noted below, illegal immigrants give employers fake SSNs. The employers look the other way, claiming plausibly that there was no way for them to know the SSN was fake, thus avoiding the employer penalties that were put in place in 1986. All that’s needed to hold employers accountable is a validation system that employers can use, like the one I proposed in my simple two-step solution.

“If someone loses a job, then they must leave. Now that everyone currently here is documented, it becomes easier to make this happen.“

If they won’t leave now, when they’re undocumented, why would they leave then, when they’re undocumented? They’d get a fake SSN and continue working.

“Their social security money will be available to them when they return to their own nation. Finally a financial incentive for them to return.“

Yeah, but only when they retire, by which time President Chelsea Clinton will have given them amnesty.

“Illegals are currently stuck in America. Currently if they leave, they cannot come back. By granting them the ability to leave and return if they have a job, there is a chance they will head back.“

No way. Not when they know there’s yet another amnesty coming.

All of Keith’s arguments are calculated to convince conservatives that the Bush immigration “reform” proposal will reduce illegal immigration. I have a far simpler solution that will accomplish the same thing; but it requires you to renounce the president’s first assumption - that we need low-skilled, poorly-educated immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do.”

This really is a debate about just how much immigration America can take. I favor keeping immigration at reasonable levels (and I say that as a non-white recent legal immigrant.) At reasonable levels of immigration, immigrants are forced to assimilate into the American mainstream and adopt the American culture (yes, there is such a thing.) At very high levels of immigration - like the de facto illegal immigration we’re experiencing, or the legal immigration the president proposes - immigrants will not need to assimilate. They will cluster in immigrant enclaves, which will create a racial underclass of low-skilled, poor menial laborers who’re culturally alienated from the rest of the country. That is a volatile recipe for the sort of racial and ethnic strife you usually see in countries other than the United States.

– PoliPundit

I think we’ve flogged the immigration issue to death. My position should be abundantly clear by now: If the president’s suicidal immigration “reform” policies are rammed through Congress by Republican leaders too stupid to appreciate their supporters, then I will be forced to reconsider my support for the president’s re-election bid.

If even one percent of Republicans feel the same way I do, then the president will be looking at a 30,000-vote deficit in Florida. Republican leaders should think about that when deciding what course of action they will pursue.

For now, I will continue to support the president on the assumption that this is merely political posturing and that the whole thing will be quietly killed in Congress.

I’ve been devoting a lot of space to this issue and I’m sure my regular political-junkie readers need their insidery-politics fix. Our regularly scheduled programming will resume now.

— PoliPundit